There are no guttering candles to catch the eye, not so much as a whiff of fragrant incense. Even the low, anticipatory murmur of a pre-Matins Anglican congregation is missing. Here I find only wooden benches, a table bearing a vase of late autumn flowers and pale, blue-grey 18th-century woodwork. I am in a Quaker Meeting House to share an hour of quiet with a Sunday morning gathering of Friends.

At first silence trickles in uneasily and the body, so indoctrinated into doing rather than being rebels. There is an urge to fidget. Eyes wander, ears become acutely aware of disruptive sounds. But soon the silence steadies, settles and becomes palpable, threaded with strands of the holy. It engulfs all distraction, subsuming it until even the gurgle of water in the radiator pipes and the barking of a dog become an integral part of it.

Journey deeper into the silence with TS Eliot - "We must be still and still moving into another intensity, for a further union, a deeper communion" - and curious things begin to happen. Time changes its consistency. No longer is it linear, stretching from the meeting's start to its conclusion at 11.30am. It has become undemanding, motionless.

Sight intensifies and the bowl of wild flowers on the table takes on a colour, delicacy, scent and beauty that had previously eluded me. Hearing is distilled so that the faintest sounds - a butterfly beating its wings against the window glass, the drone of a bee - point to a harmony and complexity in nature that thrills one to the core.

Here in the profound silence there is no onward-going dialogue with a personal God, no credal assertion to make, no doctrinal nicety to tax the mind and best of all no induced guilt. We have moved through and beyond all that.

But isn't this a cop-out, an escape to a visionary world, a contrived forgetting of all that we would rather put behind us? It could be if we were to treat it purely as a self-indulgent running away from all that matters. But the Quaker silence is not like that. It is firmly world-rooted, ethically anchored and existentially grounded.

At this point of heightened awareness silence reveals its hidden dynamic and begins its transforming work, reshaping and recreating what Paul Tillich called "the depths of our being". The silence becomes a powerhouse for realigning our perceptions, re-evaluating our relationship with the universe and easing the inner angst of having to daily confront a perplexing, apparently meaningless and sometimes terrible world.

Out of this seething cauldron the seeds of a spiritual reawakening begin to emerge. That failing relationship which is dragging us down is imbued with fresh possibilities. Intractable problems seem less overwhelming.

We no longer view the world as an assault course of violence, uncertainty, prejudice, exasperation and injustice. We have come to see ourselves as an integral and indispensable part of the whole, not as hostile outsiders attempting to harness and shape the flow of existence to our own ends. Our sour vision of the world has become altogether kinder, more optimistic. And that can only be good.

In this transfigured state we may even find ourselves tossing out into the world holistic and healing words such as peace, glory, gratitude, compassion, joy and hope.

Empty idealism, I hear you say. And that is a valid charge. My only rejoinder and defence is a pragmatic one. It works for me.

By the end of the silent hour, broken only by the ministry of an elderly lady who told us of her loneliness, I knew that I had come home.

I left the Quaker Meeting House with the words of the great German mystic and poet Rainer Maria Rilke ringing in my ears: I come home from the soaring / in which I lost myself./ I was song, and the refrain which is God/ is still roaring in my ears./ I'd gone very far, as far as the angels, / and high, where light thins into nothing. / But deep in the darkness is God.